Reading lips in Second Life
By Eric Reuters
Voice in Second Life can be a tricky thing. Remembering to press the “talk” button on cue often means residents stop moving their avatar, and a voice chat can be visually flat, with the occasional avatar slumping over in Second Life’s “away” pose if they go too long without moving their mouse.
But a new technology could add a whole new level of immersion to voice chat. Called “Lipsync,” now a viewer alternative to the Second Life browser, it lets Second Life avatars move their lips in rhythm to their speech.
Anyone with the viewer installed will not only see their own avatar speaking, but also any avatar using the voice channel, said Brigit Lichtenegger (Second Life: Evo Szuyuan) of Rotterdam, whose company Creative Machinery is hosting the viewer files. Despite the name “Lipsync,” the mouth movements won’t match the speech. The resulting effect is a bit like watching a movie dubbed in a foreign language.
Watch a demo video of Lipsync.
The Lipsync technology was originally coded by avatar Mm Alder in conjunction with IBM, but has been placed in the open source domain under a general public license. Lichtenegger said Linden Lab officials have green-lighted Lipsync’s inclusion into Second Life’s default browser, but Linden officials were unavailable to comment.
(Video courtesy of Creative Machinery)
They must see a software called “Onlive Traveler” from mid 90’s… On this software, the lips open more when a louder sound is emitted, and open less when it’s near silence, and do not open at all on absence of sound coming from the user’s microphone… The result was great, and didn’t look like a dubbed movie! Caution: Onlive Traveler doesn’t seen to work properly on XP… It seens to corrupt the XP installation. Try it on a separate partition. It was made for Windows 95.
Sat Mar 29, 2008 7:03am PDTWell, maybe this will be some impetus to prod LL to improve the avatar - we desperately need better avs - namely in the areas of facial and hand expression.
Wed Apr 2, 2008 7:04pm PDTThanks for mentioning this.
A few points of clarification:
First, although I work for IBM and IBM does have some joint projects with Linden Lab, this is not an official IBM project, just something I’m doing on my own.
Second, Evo not only is kind enough to host the files, but also does the Mac builds as well.
Third, the quality could be improved if we could get access to the audio stream. As it is, the voice chat is closed source and the audio stream does not go through the SecondLife viewer; it runs in a separate process called SLVoice.
As I understand it, SLVoice was written by ViVox for Linden, and that project was started before the Second Life Open Source project was started, so opening the source was not part of the agreement.
Mike
Thu Apr 3, 2008 1:04pm PDT